Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Apple’s new M1 Macs

Considering this game was featured during Apple’s keynote yesterday, I’d love to know how it runs on the new M1 hardware. It could be surprisingly good and a cheap way to get into the game if you need to upgrade older hardware.

Is anyone here planning on buying a new MacBook or the Mini?

Once the early adopters have provided some independent benchmarks I could conceivably be interested. Until then we don't know the true performance of the chip

Forgot to mention Larian also tweeted about it too, which makes me think they’ll be going all in and running it as a Universal binary, not through Rosetta 2. That being the case, it will make porting over to iPads a LOT easier. DOS2 for iPads has been in development for some time, but I think BG3 will be much quicker.

Can anyone from Larian give some broad performance claims about this game on Mac? 60fps?

I did track down some footage of BG3 running on M1 Macs here (about 7 mins in): https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/10859

Read this:

https://wccftech.com/intel-and-amd-...s-m1-in-cinebench-r23-benchmark-results/

Now bear in mind that these are not the fastest Intel and AMD CPUs by a country mile--these are all *mobile/laptop* CPUs shipping right now from AMD and Intel. AMD absolutely crushes Apple M1 in multithreaded workloads and benchmarks--which is the only reason to buy multicore CPUs, of course...;) Moving to desktop CPUs Apple's M1 is simply shredded, folded, and mutilated.

Don't mistake me--ARM CPUs are great for low power/embedded devices--that's what ARM has always been known for! That fits nicely with Apple's apparent direction to go to all low-power devices instead of performance competitive MacBooks. But on top of not being competitive in multicore workloads with even lower-performance mobile/laptop CPUs from AMD, M1 will have the added burden of a software emulator to work through, as well--for the existing Mac software.

The CPU seems to do well in single-threaded scenarios, which is nice, but seems to be pretty underperforming in multicore performance--compared to existing AMD mobile/laptop CPUs. Single threaded performance is what was all important a couple of decades ago, but multithreaded performance is where the "action" is in performance today. Looking ahead, multithreaded performance is set to dominate the performance sector. Apple is moving to longer battery life for mobile devices with the caveat being low multithreaded performance--much lower multithreaded performance, it would seem.

Will this be the last of Apple's CPU "transitions"? Who can say?...;) I'm only glad I am sticking with much more solid and reliable companies. Every time Apple pulls one of these "transitions" it loses a certain percentage of its Mac customers--every time--and seeing as how fully 90% of Apple's business today is generated from the sale of cell phones, I don't see anything surprising here at all. Apple wants to become a low-power device company, primarily, and at this rate I think they will get there...;)

And yet single core clock speed is still the most important factor in gaming cpu wise. That’s definitely changing, don’t get me wrong, but...

This isn't written by Larian Studios, but the tech part should be very similar:

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/...p;utm_source=Community&sf132621650=1
quote from Matt Firor, ZOS’s Studio Director

"As most Mac users know, last summer Apple announced that new Macs will no longer be built with Intel CPUs. Instead, new Macs will utilize a new custom-built ARM CPU going forward. The first of these devices was announced earlier this month at an Apple event.

Please be aware that these new ARM-based Macs cannot run software created for Intel-based computers. Additionally, these new machines will not support Boot Camp either, so you cannot dual boot an ARM-based Mac into Windows. This means that all software running on the new Macs must either be re-written for ARM or must run through an emulator. X86 emulation comes with a significant performance impact—in general, emulation is okay for software like office productivity apps, but not for gaming.

All of this puts a burden on software developers like ZOS to port their products to the new architecture. It is a huge undertaking to port a product as old, large, and complex as ESO to a new CPU, with no certain outcome of success. Because of these factors, we will not be porting ESO to run on the new ARM-based Macs. ESO will continue to run on Intel-based Macs, and we will support it as long as there is a large enough Mac user base to warrant it. While it will be technically possible to run ESO via x86 emulation on the new Macs, expect a subpar gaming experience that we will not officially support."

It’ll probably be a long while before we see any Bethesda/Microsoft properties running natively on Apple Silicon, aside from those that are already in the iOS App Store. Still, that leaves more market share for those that are willing to take the leap, like Larian. From what I’ve seen of the M1 reviews so far, I’m expecting BG3 to run serviceably but not well on these chips. I’ll likely wait until their more serious chips emerge (M2? M1X?), for the iMac / iMac Pro, Mac Pro, 16” MacBook Pro etc.

I thought Macs were invented for starbucks so people clould be seen publicly checking their facebook status with a $1800 alumium heat sink? Why anyone would use them for games has always been a mystery to me.

Soon they’ll be able to sit at Starbucks and play BG3.

Larian did a great job with the Mac version of DOS2, even added themed hotkeys to the Touch Bar. I guess they did well enough out of it to make it a priority for BG3.

Haha didn't bite. Of course Larian will open the game to as many people as possible. As stated the new ARM CPU has amazing potential but requires compatibility programmers. Honestly if you cut down the textures and optimised BG3 you could play it on a decent tablet.